Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children ** ½

*ing: Eva Green, Judi Dench, Asa Butterfield, Samuel L. Jackson, Rupert Everett and
Allison Janney

Directed by Tim Burton

Tim Burton is a wizard of odd. The best of his films take us into a world where anything is possible … but the impossible is even better. Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, based on Ransom Rigg’s 2011 young-adult novel, is so crowded with incident that it sometimes seems in danger of imploding. But Burton has always had an affinity for the peculiar. So how could he resist Miss Peregrine? As played by the bracingly eccentric Eva Green (the Penny Dreadful star who worked with Burton in 2012′s Dark Shadows), Miss Peregrine is a Mary Poppins for society’s rejects. A girl with two jaws, a boy who can animate inanimate objects, some mysterious twins - its Willy Wonka meets the X-brats with a stop at Hogwarts.

Miss P herself can, at a moment’s notice, transform into a bird - a peregrine falcon, to be exact. Nazi bombs destroyed her Victorian orphanage on the Welsh island of Cairnholm during World War II. But do you think bombs can really touch her or her young charges? Nah. She’s devised time bubbles, loops lasting 24-hours in which her peculiar wards can stay safe, except they have to repeat the same day over and over like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, but not as hilarious. The loop has worked for over 70 years. But now a new villain named Barron (Samuel L. Jackson) is determined to penetrate this bizzarro Brigadoon, the better to chow down on the eyeballs of gifted kids.

I won’t give away Burton’s visual surprises. But I will say that the present breaks into the past in the person of Jacob (Asa Butterfield), a teen visitor from 21st-century Florida who wants to know about this enchanted place where his recently murdered grandfather Abe (Terence Stamp) grew up in 1943. Seems reasonable. He thinks they’ll love his smartphone. It also gives Jacob the chance to hit on the gorgeous Emma (Ella Purnell), the same beauty his grandfather had a thing for.

Still with me? Don’t sweat it. Just go with the spell Burton casts with the help of screenwriter Jane Goldman (Stardust). Yes, the film feels overstuffed and way too familiar, with Burton repeating tricks from his greatest hits (think Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands). And the fun runs out much before the film ends. But stick with it just for those times when Burton flies high on his own peculiar genius.

Snowden **

*ing: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Shailene Woodley, Melissa Leo and Zachary Quinto

Directed by Oliver Stone

What’s your take on Edward Snowden: A patriot deserving of a presidential pardon? A traitor deserving of execution, as Trump believes? Something in between? In Snowden the movie, in which a fiercely committed Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays the title role, Oliver Stone removes all doubt. He’s Saint Edward, the cyber-nerd who’s living in exile in Russia for the crime (or heroic act) of leaking classified NSA documents that show how Uncle Sam (or Big Brother) is monitoring us, all of us, 24/7. As in Citizenfour, the brilliant documentary from Laura Poitras, Stone’s film is framed with the then-30-year-old former government employee holed up in a Hong Kong hotel room for eight days in June of 2013. It’s there, with Poitras (Melissa Leo) and journalists Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto) and Ewen MacAskill (Tom Wilkinson), that he decides to risk charges of espionage to blow the lid off a vast government conspiracy.

If that sounds like a juicy op for Stone to go apeshit on the evil empire of surveillance, don’t get your hopes up. The director tamps down his wild side to wave the flag for whistleblowing. Nothing wrong with that in theory. In practice, it sucks the life out of a movie that actually tells us less than the Poitras doc did. Stone strands us in biopic territory, which is no place for his rabid gifts as a filmmaker.

The script, co-written by Stone and Kieran Fitzgerald, ticks off the high points. Snowden getting sidelined in Special Forces training by frail health (he’s also prone to epileptic seizures). Snowden making his bones at the CIA in Virginia, where he meets Hank Forrester (a quietly and wonderfully crazy Nicolas Cage), a contractor who’s been sidelined for speaking truth to power. Snowden impressing intelligence honcho Corbin O’Brian (Rhys Ifans), who sees the kid’s talent but worries about controlling it. On a room-sized video conference screen, Stone blows up O’Brian’s head so large he looks a big unfriendly giant ready snack on this puny rebel. It’s too much -- but Stone’s particular brand of too much, and I only wish there was more of it. The key figure here is Lindsay Mills (a spirited Shailene Woodley), the liberal hottie who will eventually melt down Snowden’s conservative resistance. She’s his conscience, and yes it’s a nagging one that leads to him trying to right the wrongs he’s been party to.

The reliably adventurous Gordon-Levitt seems ready to rock, letting us sense the conflicting principles dueling in Snowden’s head. Disappointingly, Stone reduces an ethical quagmire to one easily digestible question: Is the U.S. justified in spying on its own citizens in the name of national security? Larger, thornier implications are ignored. Yet it’s those implications, the ones that pit transparency against covert geopolitics, that are more worth exploring than biographical sleuthing. Snowden himself agrees. On screen, he says flatly: “I’m not the story.” Tell that to Stone, who sticks to the surface and buries the provocation.

- Courtesy: Rolling Stone

Rating system:  *Not on your life     ** Hardly worth the bother     ** ½ Okay for a slow afternoon only     *** Good enough for a look see     *** ½ Recommended viewing     **** Don’t miss it     **** ½ Almost perfect     ***** Perfection